In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time, I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a hopeless search, and how persistence eventually paid off. There’s still an unsolved mystery too, so I’m hoping others will see this and help to fill in the blanks!
This whole saga starts with a very interesting blog post written by Pierre Dandumont in 2022. Pierre’s (excellent) blog is in French — Google does a good job of translating it for me. He found a quote in a book referring to special functionality bundled with Apple’s Macintosh Performa 550 computer:
The LC 550’s Secret Partition
If Apple’s programmers, in creating the Performa series, were aiming to make idiot-proof computers, they were serious about it. The Performa 550 is an amazing case in point. When you run the included Apple Backup program (see Chapter 15), you get a little surprise that you didn’t count on: a hidden partition on your hard drive!
This invisible chunk of hard drive space contains a miniature, invisible System Folder. Apple’s internal memo explains it this way:
“When a system problem (one that prevents the Performa from booting) is detected, a [dialog box] informs the user of a system problem. The user can choose to fix the problem manually or to reinstall software from the backup partition’s Mini System Folder.”
If you choose to reinstall your System software, you get the wristwatch cursor for a moment while the miniature System Folder is silently copied to your main hard-drive partition. The Performa restarts from the restored hard drive, and the invisible system partition disappears once again.
We got a Performa team member to admit that this kind of sneaky save-the-users-from-themselves approach may well be adopted in other Performa models.
Who knows what goodness lurks in the hearts of men?
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